The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Even young Nazis were ‘disappointed and discontented’. Under the surface, the old tradition of the youth movement lived on, as rebellious boys learned old, now forbidden, hiking songs and hummed the tunes to one another at Hitler Youth camps as a sign of recognition; they clubbed together at camp and organized their own activities where they could.207 But a good number of other Social Democratic observers curbed their desire to seek light at the end of the tunnel and reported gloomily that the younger generation were losing touch with the values of their elders and falling prey to Nazi ideology under the impact of the Hitler Youth and indoctrination in the schools. For all their deficiencies, the Hitler Youth movement and the increasingly Nazified school system were driving a wedge between parents who still retained some loyalty to the beliefs and standards they had grown up in themselves, and their children who were being indoctrinated at every stage of their lives. As one such agent ruefully observed:It is extremely difficult for parents who are opponents of the Nazis to exercise an influence on their children. Either they ask the child not to talk at school about what is said at home. Then the children get the feeling, aha, the parents have to hide what they think. The teacher permits himself to say everything out loud. So he’s bound to be right. - Or the parents express their opinion without giving the child a warning. Then it’s not long before they are arrested or at the very least called up before the teacher, who shouts at them and threatens to report them. - ‘Send your father to the school!’ That is the normal answer to suspicious doubts and questions on the part of the child. If the father is quiet after such a visit, then he gives the child the impression that he has been convinced by what the teacher has told him, and the effect is far worse than if nothing had ever been said.208

  There were even more disturbing reports of children whose membership in the Hitler Youth was disapproved of by their parents threatening to report them to the authorities if they tried to stop them going to meetings. For adolescents, it was only too easy to annoy parents who were former Social Democrats by greeting them at home with ‘Hail, Hitler!’ instead of ‘good morning’. ‘Thus war is taken into every family’, one wife of an old labour movement activist observed. ‘The worst is’, she added apprehensively, ‘that you’ve got to watch yourself in front of your own children.’209

  Thus state and Party were both undermining the socializing and educating functions of the family. Baldur von Schirach was aware of this criticism and sought to counter it with the allegation that many poor and working-class children did not have a proper family life anyway. The middle-class parents who were most vociferous in complaining about the time their children were forced to spend outside the home in activities organized by the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls should remember, he said, ‘that the Hitler Youth has called up its children to the community of National Socialist youth so that they can give the poorest sons and daughters of our people something like a family for the first time’.210 But such arguments were only liable to increase resentment among working-class parents. Bringing up children, many of them complained, was no longer a pleasure. The costs of providing uniforms and equipment for their children in the Hitler Youth was considerable, and they got nothing back in exchange. ‘Nowadays, childless couples are often congratulated by parents on their childlessness. These days parents have nothing more than the duty to feed and clothe their children; educating them is in the first place the task of the Hitler Youth.’211 One ‘old soldier’ was heard complaining about his son, a Hitler Youth activist, in bitter terms: ‘The lad has already been completely alienated from us. As an old front-soldier I’m against every war, and this lad is just mad about war and nothing else. It’s awful, sometimes I feel as if my lad is the spy in the family.’212

  The overall effect of Hitler Youth membership, some Social Democratic observers complained, was a ‘coarsening’ of the young. The suppression of any discussion or debate, the military discipline, the emphasis on physical prowess and competition, led boys to become violent and aggressive, especially towards young people who for whatever reason had not joined the Hitler Youth.213 Hitler Youth groups travelling by train amused themselves by insulting and threatening guards who failed to say ‘Hail, Hitler!’ every time they asked a passenger for his ticket. Camps held in rural districts were liable to give rise to a flood of complaints from local farmers about thefts of fruit from their orchards. So rough was the training to which the children were subjected that injuries of one kind and another were a frequent occurrence. Training in ‘boxing’ made a point of dispensing with rules or precautions: ‘The more blood the lads saw flowing on such occasions, the more enthusiastic they became.’ In the Hitler Youth, as in the SA, the army and the Labour Service, one Social Democratic agent noted, a process of brutalization was setting in. ‘The kind of leader they have and the way they treat everyone degrades human beings to animals there, turns everything sexual into smut. There are many who get venereal diseases.’ ‘Once a month, in many divisions of the Hitler Youth, they carry out the kind of “sex parade” that we all remember from the war’.214 The Hitler Youth refused to provide sex education, declaring it a matter for parents. Cases of homosexual behaviour by Hitler Youth leaders in the camps were hushed up; there was no question of bringing them to the attention of the press, as had happened in the campaign of allegations brought against Catholic priests working in care institutions. In one particularly serious case in 1935, just as Goebbels was beginning his exposure of sex scandals in the Church, a boy was sexually assaulted by several others at a Hitler Youth camp then knifed to death to stop him talking. When his mother found out what had happened and reported it to Reich Commissioner Mutschmann, he immediately had her arrested and imprisoned to prevent the scandal from coming out into the open. Parents who complained about any aspect of their children’s treatment in the camps, or took their children out of the organization for their own good, were liable to be accused of undermining the Hitler Youth and could even on occasion be silenced by the threat that, if they continued, their children would be taken into care.215 An attempt by no less a personage than Heinrich Himmler, in collaboration with Schirach, to impose discipline through an internal Hitler Youth police force, established in July 1934, was effective mainly in providing a recruiting mechanism for the SS.216

  The indiscipline of the Hitler Youth had a particularly disruptive effect in the schools. Its teenage activists, showered by the regime with assurances of their central importance to the nation’s future and accustomed to commanding groups of younger children considerably larger than the classes their teachers taught, behaved with increasing arrogance towards their elders in school. ‘By continually whipping up their self-confidence, ’ one Hitler Youth leader himself admitted, ‘the leadership encourages amongst many boys a kind of megalomania that refuses to recognize any other authority.’217 In the struggle between the Hitler Youth and the schools, the former was gradually getting the upper hand.218 The Hitler Youth wore their own uniforms in school, so that increasingly the teachers faced classes dressed to advertise their primary allegiance to an institution run from outside. A regulation of January 1934 giving the Hitler Youth equal status with the schools as an educational institution further boosted their self-confidence.219 Adolescent rebelliousness was being channelled against socializing institutions such as the school, as well as parents, the family and the Churches. Former Hitler Youth members recalled in interviews after the war how they had gained more power in school through their membership.220 Even the Security Service of the SS expressed its concern in 1939 at the deteriorating relations between teachers and Hitler Youth.221 In 1934, one Social Democratic agent reported that a Hitler Youth ‘school leader’ told a sixty-year-old teacher who had put his hat on in the bitter winter cold of the weekly Monday-morning collective drill, when the whole school sang the national anthem and greeted the raising of the Nazi flag with doffed caps, that if he did this again he would be reported.222 Only rarely were teachers ingenious enough to find a way of reass
erting their control without running the risk of denunciation, as in the case of one mathematics teacher at a Cologne secondary school, who addressed particularly knotty arithmetical questions to two Hitler Youth leaders who appeared in his class in uniform, with the words: ‘As Hitler Youth leaders you must surely set a good example; surely you can solve this question!’223

  IV

  The school system of the Third Reich was formally under the aegis of Bernhard Rust, who was appointed Prussian Minister of Education and Religion (Kultusminister) in 1933. A schoolteacher himself, Rust had joined the Nazi Party early on and became District Leader of Southern Hanover and Brunswick in 1925. He was fifty years of age when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, somewhat older than the other leading Nazis, who were mostly in their thirties or early forties. On 1 May 1934 Rust secured his own appointment to the new Reich Ministry of Science and Education, which took over the Prussian Ministry and, in effect, the regional Ministries, at the beginning of 1935, while responsibility for religion and the Churches passed to the new Reich Church Ministry led, as we saw earlier in this chapter, by Hans Kerrl. On 20 August 1937 the Reich Education Ministry took central control over the appointment of all established teachers, and in 1939 it set up a Reich Examination Office to oversee all educational examinations. Meanwhile, it had also acted on 20 March 1937 to rationalize the secondary school system, a long-standing demand of teachers, already planned under the Weimar Republic, into three basic types of school, concentrating on modern languages and the humanities, on science and technology, or on a classics-based curriculum.224 And on 6 July 1938 the regime issued another law extending the Prussian school structure established in 1927 to the whole of Germany, laying down a minimum requirement for all children of eight years at school - a step forward for Bavaria, which had hitherto only had required seven, but a step backward for Schleswig-Holstein, where the minumum had traditionally been nine. It was this law that also laid down a centrally determined curriculum, including ‘racial education’ for all.225

  On Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1933, Rust founded three National Political Educational Institutions or ‘Napolas’, boarding schools set up in the premises of former Prussian military cadet schools (rendered defunct by the Treaty of Versailles) and designed to train a new elite to rule the future Third Reich.226 The need to please President Hindenburg, who had been a student at one of these cadet schools, may have played a role as well. By 1939 there were 16 Napolas in existence.227 They were intended to provide a military training and were equipped with riding stables, motor-bikes, yachts and the like, all signs that the sports the students were trained in had a distinctly aristocratic tinge that would reinforce their elitist self-image. On graduating, the pupils usually went into the armed forces, the SS or the police as officers.228 The students were selected in the first place according to racial criteria, decided by a medical examination carried out by a qualified doctor, and then by character traits, displayed during an entrance test that consisted above all of competitive sports in which the applicants were required to demonstrate their courage and aggression.229

  At the same time, however, at the insistence of the officials in Rust’s Ministry, the Napolas continued to teach the regular state school curriculum with its academic subjects, as befitted state educational institutions. At the Party Congress in 1934, and again in 1935, Hitler insisted that political education was a matter for the Party and not for state-run institutions or state-appointed teachers. In conformity with this view, the Napolas were run by SS and SA officers without any previous educational experience. The administration appointed a parallel staff of ‘educators’ from the same background to work alongside the trained teachers who provided the pupils with normal school lessons. All the staff had to undergo regular special training, and the students also had to spend time several weeks a year working on a farm or a factory to maintain contacts with the people. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that it soon proved difficult to find enough qualified teachers. Those who did serve in many cases did so because they themselves had had previous experience of the Prussian cadet schools, and some of the heads consciously revived some of the old Prussian cadet school traditions. It was apparent to some in the Nazi leadership by 1934 therefore that the Napolas were more reactionary throwbacks to the old Prussian tradition than modern institutions dedicated to the creation of a new elite for the Third Reich. They seemed to be more interested in supplying the army with officers than the state with leaders.230 The man in charge of the day-to-day management of the schools was Joachim Haupt, a professional educationalist who had published a number of writings under the Weimar Republic urging the foundation of a new educational system devoted to racial and political training. But in the wake of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, Haupt came under attack from the SS, who more than hinted that he was homosexual and claimed that Rust wanted to be rid of him because he was too reactionary. As a consequence, Haupt was sacked in 1935 and the overall management and inspection of the Napolas transferred to a senior SS officer, August Heissmeyer; eventually, the administration of the Napolas was turned over to the SS altogether. As a new type of state educational institution, they had not been much of a success. Nor were their standards really high enough to provide the regime with a new elite cadre of leaders for the future.231

  Map 7. Nazi Elite Schools

  As these events illustrated, Rust was less than effective when it came to dealing with the big hitters in the Nazi power structure. He was subject to bouts of depression, alternating with periods of manic optimism and aggression, which made it difficult for him to carry out a consistent policy line; his civil servants distrusted him and often obstructed his orders and he was often in no shape to stand up to the predatory aggression of his rivals in the top echelons of the Party. Rust also suffered from a progressive paralysis of the facial muscles that caused him increasing pain as time went on, which further limited his ability to stand up to opposition.232 His Napolas were soon outflanked by two far more ideological institutions, run not, as the Napolas were, by the state, but controlled from the outset by organs of the Party. On 15 January 1937, Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach and German Labour Front Leader Robert Ley issued a joint announcement reporting that Hitler, at their request, had ordered the founding of ‘Adolf Hitler Schools’, secondary schools run by the Hitler Youth, which would determine the curriculum and be supervised by Nazi Party Regional Leaders.233 Overriding Rust’s furious objections, the two leaders set up the first Adolf Hitler School on 20 April 1937. The intention was, as Ley declared, that nobody in future would be able to take on a leading position in the Party without first having undergone an education in these institutions. Two-thirds of the pupils at the Adolf Hitler Schools were boarders. The Hitler Youth determined the curriculum, which focused even more strongly than the Napolas on physical and military education. Like the Napolas, the Adolf Hitler Schools did not provide any religious instruction. There were no examinations but instead a regular ‘Achievement Week’ at which the students had to compete against each other in every area.234 Drawing on the Hitler Youth across Germany, these schools, which provided an education from the age of twelve free of charge, became something of a vehicle of upward social mobility, with 20 per cent of their pupils coming from backgrounds that could broadly be defined as working-class.235 Initially only physical criteria were applied to select students for admission, but by 1938 it had become clear that the neglect of intellectual abilities was causing serious problems, since a large proportion of the pupils could not grasp even the fairly basic political ideas that the teachers were trying to transmit to them. From this time onwards, therefore, academic criteria were added to the other elements in the admission process. The teachers appointed in the first couple of years, all leaders of the Hitler Youth, were not very competent either, and from 1939 onwards they were required to undergo proper teacher training at a university before taking up their posts. Ley’s idea was that there should be one of these schools in each Nazi P
arty Region, under the general management of the Party Regional Leader; but the Nazi Party management successfully objected that the costs would be too great for the Party to bear, and the full complement of schools was never reached. In 1938 only 600 pupils were taken on nationwide, far fewer than the original plan had envisaged. The buildings under construction to house the schools were never completed, and until 1941 the schools depended overwhemingly on rented premises in the Order Castle at Sonthofen.236

  The Order Castles (Ordensburgen) were the next stage in the system of Party-based education dreamed up by Schirach and Ley. They were intended exclusively to teach graduates of the Adolf Hitler Schools, though before being admitted the students had to undergo vocational training or university education and prove their personal and ideological soundness. Not only did the students not pay any fees, they even received pocket-money from the schools. There were three Order Castles, located high up in remote country districts. They were designed by leading architects on a lavish scale. Construction began in March 1934 and the buildings were opened two years later. They were intended to form an interconnected system of education and training. Students were to spend the first year at the Falkenburg, on the Crössin Lake in Pomerania, being educated in racial biology and undertaking various sporting activities; in their second year the students were supposed to move to Vogelsang Castle, in the Eifel hills above the Rhine, which concentrated more exclusively on sport; and in their third year they were to move to Sonthofen Castle, in the mountainous district of Bavaria Allgäu, where they were to undergo further ideological training and to engage in dangerous sports such as mountaineering. The regime intended to build a fourth Order Castle, at Marienburg, to focus on instruction about Eastern Europe, and ultimately a ‘High School’ on the Chiem Lake, in Bavaria, to carry out research and to train teachers for the Order Castles and the Adolf Hitler Schools. In the meantime, however, the elite pupils of the Order Castles had to spend three separate monthly periods every year working in Party organizations in the regions, so that they had experience of practical politics; and the Order Castles in turn functioned as training centres for numerous Nazi Party officials on short courses, as well as teacher training centres for the Adolf Hitler Schools.237 As the name suggested, the aim of the Order Castles was to create a modern version of the medieval knightly and monastic orders of old: disciplined, united and dedicated to a cause; to underline this intention, the students were known as ‘Junkers’. Together with the Adolf Hitler Schools, they were the means by which the Party planned to secure its future leadership in the long term.238